Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, on Thursday once again trained his guns at the Election Commission, alleging large-scale ‘vote fraud’ in electoral rolls since the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Addressing a press conference at the new party headquarters, Indira Bhawan, Rahul Gandhi said, “The foundation of our Constitution is based on the fact that one person gets one vote. And so, when we are planning elections, the most fundamental thing is how secure the idea of one person, one vote is.”
“Are the right people being allowed to vote? Are fake people being added to the voter list? Is the voter list accurate?” the Congress leader asked.
The Prime Minister needed to ‘steal’ only 25 seats to stay in power in 2024, and the BJP won 25 seats with a margin of less than 33,000 votes during the Lok Sabha polls, Rahul Gandhi alleged.
He pointed out that, for some time now, there has been suspicion among the public based on a couple of points.
“Anti-incumbency is something that hits every single party in every democracy. For some reason, the BJP seems to be the only party in a democratic framework that is not affected by anti-incumbency,” the Rae Bareli MP said.
He stated that millions of Indians were suspicious about how the BJP ‘magically’ becomes immune to anti-incumbency, how it manages to get huge and unexpected victory margins, how opinion and exit polls are way off the mark, and the choreographed election schedule.
The Congress leader said that before Maharashtra, the party hadn’t been able to articulate the reason and logic behind the suspicion.
“But in Haryana and Maharashtra, we saw it right in front of us,” the Gandhi scion alleged.
He alleged that in Maharashtra, more voters were added in five months than in five years, which was a staggering fact.
“Additionally, the number of voters added exceeded the entire population of certain areas, which was surprising. Then, there was a huge jump in voter turnout after 5 pm,” he said.
Rahul Gandhi pointed out that its alliance, which had swept the Lok Sabha elections just a few months back, was wiped out in the Vidhan Sabha elections, which was very suspicious.
Firing salvos, he said, “What is the crux of the problem? The voter list is the property of this country. The Election Commission absolutely refuses to give us the voter list. We requested a machine-readable Maharashtra voter list, but the EC rejected our plea.”
He also said that machine-readable formats are key because we need digital copies to analyze the data.
“There was a question about massive voting after 5:30 p.m. in Maharashtra. But our people and alliance partners knew that it didn’t happen in the polling booths. There were no large lines after 5:30 p.m. These two things made us believe with reasonable certainty that the Election Commission was colluding with the BJP to steal elections,” the former Congress chief alleged.
He also admitted that, though they still lacked proof, they had evidence at the larger state level in Maharashtra, showing voters had been added, but they didn’t know how they were added, where they came from, or how the system works.
“So, we assembled a team and told them we need to understand how this is being done,” he said.
Slamming the poll panel, Rahul Gandhi said, “The Election Commission has evaded and destroyed evidence as it refused to share the digital voter rolls and changed the rules to restrict access to CCTV footage.”
He asked the poll panel, “What is it hiding? The public has a right to complete transparency.”
He also stressed that no records should be destroyed.
The Congress leader, while showing a presentation of the alleged vote theft, said that this was the challenge.
“We had seven feet of paper, and we had to sort through every single one. Suppose I wanted to find out if someone had voted twice or if their name occurred twice in the voter list; I would have to compare their picture to every single photo in every single sheet. That’s the process, and it’s very tedious. When we faced this, we realised why the Election Commission doesn’t give us electronic data — they don’t want us to scrutinize it carefully,” he said.
He stated that this task took us six months, with 30-40 people working non-stop, comparing names, addresses, and pictures. And this was just for one assembly constituency.
He asserted that if the Commission had given them the electronic data, it would have taken only 30 seconds.
“This is why we’re being given data in this format — so that it isn’t analyzed,” he said, adding that these papers (voter rolls) themselves don’t allow for optical character recognition; if you scan them, you can’t extract the data.
“The EC deliberately provides non-machine-readable papers, which we found strange,” he said.
In the presentation, he mentioned that the Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha seat was stolen and explained how the poll panel allegedly colluded with the BJP to steal the election.
Rahul Gandhi explained that there were 1,00,250 votes stolen in the Mahadevapura assembly in Karnataka.
He mentioned that there were five types of voter theft, which included 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters at a single address, 4,133 invalid photos, and 33,692 misuse of Form 6.
He stated that “our internal polls indicated that we were expected to win 16 Lok Sabha seats in Karnataka.”
“However, we won nine. We then focused on the seven unexpected losses and chose Mahadevapura, a Vidhan Sabha constituency. All the data we have here is from the 2024 elections, sourced from the Election Commission,” he alleged.
Doubling down on the poll panel, he stated, “In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP secured 6,58,915 votes, winning with a margin of 32,707. However, in the Mahadevapura assembly segment, the Congress received 1,15,586 votes, whereas the BJP garnered 2,29,632 votes.”
He further said that the Congress won all the Vidhan Sabhas except this one, where the BJP swept and secured a margin of 1,14,046 votes.
“This seat significantly contributed to their election win, and the Lok Sabha result went in their favor. This discrepancy is a huge imbalance. So, we started examining the details and discovered that approximately 1,00,250 votes were stolen out of 6,50,000 total votes in the Mahadevapura assembly,” he added.
Even last week, Rahul Gandhi had stated that an independent investigation by the opposition had revealed the poll panel’s alleged involvement in a massive vote theft to benefit the BJP and said that this is no less than treason.
Even as the Opposition INDIA bloc once again raised the issue of the Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls, Rahul Gandhi had said, “We have open and shut proof that the Election Commission is involved in vote theft. And I am not saying this lightly, I am speaking with 100 percent proof.”
He had also stated that you all will come to know this.
“When we release this (proof), the entire country will know that the Election Commission is indulged in vote theft. For whom are they doing it? They are doing it for the BJP. It’s open and shut,” he had said.
He had also claimed to have ‘atom bomb’ evidence on “vote chori” (vote theft) while not revealing much about the evidence he has.
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